REPORTER'S ACCOUNT
How I was forced to leave Baghdad
By David Filipov, Globe Staff, 3/15/2003
AGHDAD - In the end, my editors at The Boston Globe never had to make the difficult decision whether to keep me in Baghdad to cover a possible war or order me to pull out of the country.
The Iraqi government made that decision for me Thursday, ordering me to leave the country and confiscating my satellite phone. I was caught making an illegal call from the phone, an event that showed just how serious Iraqi authorities are about controlling communications by foreign media with the threat of war looming.
The summons to appear came Thursday morning from Kadhim al-Taie, the usually implacable deputy director of the press center at the Ministry of Information. Mr. Kadhim, as everyone knows him, is the man correspondents see for permission to stay in Baghdad, and therefore he always has a crowd of reporters around him.
When Mr. Kadhim chased everyone else out so that we could speak in private, I knew he wasn't going to compliment me on my writing.
''You have to leave the country!'' he shouted. ''Give me your phone, and get out of my office! This is a very, very grave offense.''
The Iraqi government tries to control all communications, and journalists are prohibited from filing stories from their satellite phones in their hotel rooms. Customs officials seal reporters' phones when they cross the Iraqi border. Only a man known as Mr. Mazen, the designated press center technical specialist, can unseal them. (Doing so by oneself is an offense.)
New media arrivals to Baghdad are easy to spot. They are the ones frantically running around with their phones in their sealed carrying cases, looking for Mr. Mazen..
To use their phones, journalists have to pay the press center $100 per day. In addition, print reporters have to pay $30 to $50 per day for a government-appointed minder and another daily fee of unclear purpose of $125 per person. Radio and television crews pay much more.
The Iraqis insist reporters leave their phones in the press center overnight and make all their calls from the press center.
It is clear that the government wants all journalists in one place if a war begins, and that place is the Ministry of Information, which US officials have indicated is a potential target for any American-led attack on Baghdad.
Aware of this, some journalists have asked the press center to move them to a safer location. Others have been trying to decide whether to leave Baghdad. Finding a safe site in the city outside the government's control is complicated by the fact that watchers and informers are everywhere.
My personal preference, born of experience in other potential conflict zones, is to keep my vital equipment where I sleep. So every night I stuck a scale that looked and weighed the same as my phone in my satellite phone bag and locked it up in Mr. Kadhim's office.
Still, I avoided using my satellite phone anywhere but the press center, especially when the signs went up at my hotel warning reporters not to try it. The exception came Wednesday night, when I got a late assignment and had to send the story after two in the morning. The transmission took 30 seconds. I didn't think anyone would be listening or be able to pick up my signal in that amount of time, but they were.
''The hotel called to warn us that David had made an illegal phone call,'' Mr. Mazen, the man in charge of satellite phones at the press center, told my driver. ''We were waiting for him when he came in this morning.''
Mr. Kadhim was livid. ''Do you realize that Iraq is not some Third World country?'' he shouted, quite uncharacteristically. ''We are more developed than America!''
The operation to nab my phone showed quite a bit of ingenuity. Someone had caught the signal in the 30 seconds I was on the line. Someone else had picked the lock on my decoy bag to reveal the scale where my phone should have been. I was caught red-handed and felt rather foolish about it (another US scribe caught with his phone in his room got off with a reprimand because he had not yet made a call).
I tried to appeal the decision. In Iraq, no usually means no until the right words are uttered to make it yes.
Every journalist who works here has to learn to ''yes the no,'' as one wag put it. Much of the day is spent chatting up the officials who work at the press center, handing out souvenirs (they loved the Globe pens), delivering deliberately undefined ''fees,'' and then waiting and hoping that they will let you stay another 10 days. This time the no meant no.
''They are cracking down on journalists now, and they need a scapegoat so that everyone sees that they are serious,'' said another senior official at the press center. ''You are the scapegoat.''
So they got my beat-up old satellite phone, literally held together by duct tape. And I got a one-way trip out of Baghdad; I traveled by road yesterday to Amman, Jordan.
''In three weeks, you'll ride back in on an American tank,'' said the senior official, making a joke that would cost him dearly if the wrong people overheard it. ''Then you can make them give you your phone back.''
This story ran on page A9 of the Boston Globe on 3/15/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. |
